


taking chances, magic happens

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cunnilingus, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/F, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Orgy, Polyjuice Potion, Post-Canon, Public Sex, Sex While Using Polyjuice Potion, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:22:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28279074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: Several years post-DH, Bellatrix runs into Hermione Granger under Polyjuice in an unexpected location. Written for the Annual Femslash Kink Meme.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Bellatrix Black Lestrange
Comments: 8
Kudos: 156
Collections: The Annual Femslash Kink Meme 2020





	taking chances, magic happens

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, "Bellatrix Lestrange/Hermione Granger, polyjuice play." Title from "Breaking Up the Girl" by Garbage.

In Bellatrix's defense, she had definitely known better. She just hadn't cared.

Supposedly, the Bacchanalia festivals had been secretly preserved from the time of Rome and hidden from Christian persecution in the magical world. Bellatrix knew for a fact that they had actually been reintroduced by a witch with muggle friends into Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and they were definitely much more about drunken revelry and sex than about the worship of Bacchus. But half of the participants would be under Polyjuice potion and three quarters too drunk to remember anything clearly, so it made a certain amount of sense that if she was going to sleep with anybody in the magical world, three years after the second war ended and she, supposedly, died, it would be at a Bacchanal.

The hair she'd stolen was from a muggle woman with curly red hair similar to her own, but half a foot of height less. Bellatrix wore secondhand silk robes and a cheap fox half-mask as an additional layer of disguise, and made sure to arrive an hour or two after the festivities started when most of the participants would already be drunk. 

It was a reasonably good plan, except that it was a completely idiotic one. 

She didn't even have a good reason. It was just that she needed, desperately, to touch someone - to _be_ touched - and she couldn't risk it under her own face, and it was too risky to try to carry on a fake relationship. She would have to keep stealing the same person's hair, for a start.

Once inside, Bella got a glass of wine and silently charmed the alcohol out, then wandered the room, sipping and looking for someone reasonably attractive and unoccupied who didn't know her well enough to recognize her mannerisms. What she found instead, on her second circuit and delicately stepping around three people sprawled on the floor at a somewhat unattractive angle, was Miss Hermione Granger, turning away with a politely blank expression from the same threesome at the other end, mead in hand.

Granger was prettier than when they last met, presumably having regular access to bathing facilities while not on the run and not recently captured, and also having grown up a few more years. She was wearing a very light set of cotton robes that left absolutely nothing to the imagination, including the places at the hollow of her throat and, just visible through the transparent fabric, the side of her hip where Bellatrix's knife had left scars three years ago. She was also clearly sober.

"Madam," she said to Bellatrix, meeting her eyes with unfogged brown ones. Bellatrix's throat closed in panic, but it was just a generic address for Granger, who flicked her eyes up and down, evaluating and not terrified or furious. Granger smiled. She liked what she saw, which well she should, since Bellatrix had chosen with party attendance in mind. (Some of the other Polyjuice users _only_ wanted to be more attractive to strangers than their usual selves.)

"You're a little bit young for me, sweetheart," Bellatrix said, after a moment, trying not to sound like herself. Probably she could - maybe should - have put on a sneer and dismissed her with a muttered insult, but she wasn't sure she could manage it without _sounding_ like Bellatrix Lestrange, in no small part because she had built a new life and kept her real one secret by not behaving that way.

"Oh, it's a Bacchanal, who cares," Granger said impatiently, stepped forward and took Bellatrix’s hand.

It would be memorable at this point to turn her down. Certainly she could do it - attendees were not obligated to accept any offer - but memorable was exactly what Bella didn’t want to be. Cursing herself in part because her hesitation had eaten the time in which she might have casually stepped away, Bellatrix leaned over to kiss Miss Hermione Granger. With Polyjuice Bellatrix was actually slightly shorter. Odd.

Yes, all right, a part of her also wanted to see that scar on her hip without the fabric veiling it and find out how bad it looked.

There was a mostly empty bench at the wall not far away. Bella steered them to it and sat the girl - woman, really, she was what, twenty or so now - down on it, then dropped to her knees, pushing the half mask up and out of the way. She didn’t particularly want to undress and make a quick exit harder for herself, and the easiest way of managing _that_ was immediate distraction. 

Pushing the lightweight robes up, Bellatrix felt a passing urge to rip them, to tangle Granger’s hands and legs in them to trap her, to bite. She pushed it back. The difficulties of establishing parameters for sadomasochism at a Bacchanal aside, that would _definitely_ cue Granger to recognize her. Instead, she kissed the inside of Granger’s knee, then inside her thigh, and felt her relax slowly under Bellatrix. When Bella glanced up, she saw Granger had let her head fall back against the wall.

She raised her head then and kissed Granger’s outer lips. Granger didn’t shave, probably didn’t want to spare the time. Bellatrix nosed her way between her labia and inhaled, letting her breath tickle Granger’s clit and feeling her shiver underneath Bella’s mouth. The only word she knew to describe the smell and taste of a woman was musk, but it seemed wholly inadequate. Every woman was a little bit different, every body had its own taste, but Bella lacked the vocabulary. She wondered vaguely if muggles, with their infamous sexual freedoms, had one. Then she dismissed the thought as irrelevant and dove in.

Granger shivered and gasped under her, undone, inattentive as she absolutely had not been three years ago when Bellatrix was torturing her. She snorted into Granger’s labia, felt the girl shudder under her, and licked her clit, then sucked, enjoying the tiny jolts in Granger’s hips that turned into a rocking motion as Bellatrix picked up speed. Bella dropped her chin to mouth at Granger’s entrance, licking it with the flat of her tongue and digging her fingers around Granger’s calves, holding her in place as she threatened to buck Bella off her in orgasm. 

Either Granger had been about to come already, probably warmed up by someone else, or she didn’t get a lot of good oral. Either was possible, Bella thought, sitting back on her heels. She raised her head, wiping at her dripping chin with her sleeve, and vaguely tried to remember if the _Prophet_ had said anything halfway plausible about Granger’s love life lately.

“You’re good at that,” Granger said, voice cracking, head still back against the wall. Her eyes were closed, her face slack. It was strange to see her unguarded and soft. Bellatrix compared this version to the terrified, determined teenager in her memories and found it preferable in ways she didn’t want to get into.

“I have a lot of practice,” Bellatrix said, hauling herself up and sitting on the bench next to Granger. She didn’t move to cuddle, but when the girl wrapped an arm around Bellatrix herself and leaned her head on her shoulder, Bellatrix didn’t pull away.

“Do you want me to...” Granger hesitated, not quite able to offer in words, even at a Bacchanal and drinking. Bellatrix squinted at the mead, and snorted when she detected traces of the same alcohol-vanishing charm she had used herself. At a Bacchanal and _sober_ , then, rather.

Granger had stiffened at the noise. Bellatrix brought a hand up, stroking her shoulder, gentle, and said, “Was this the only way you could bring yourself to try out a woman?”

Damn it, there was too much of her old accent, her old _demeanor_ , in that question. Granger didn’t seem to have noticed anything, though. She said, “It isn’t as if I’ve been dating a lot of men either, you know,” slightly defensively, but without the edge of fussiness Bellatrix vaguely remembered her having even under interrogation. “It’s difficult to find anyone under normal circumstances who doesn’t think--” She broke off, then.

“They think they know what it’s like,” Bellatrix said, comfortably. She wrapped one of Granger’s curls around her finger and twanged it lightly, watching it spring back. “They think they know you, before you’ve met at all, and they just need to catch you up on the relationship they’ve already got with the you in their head. Have I got it?”

Granger squinted at her, more awake than she’d been a moment ago. “Someone famous under the Polyjuice, are you?”

Bellatrix’s heart skipped a beat, which was unfortunate. “Well, it’s a Bacchanal,” she said, lazily, and cut herself off at that.

“So it is,” Granger said. “--So, no, I haven’t got much experience with girls. Still, do you want me to - reciprocate?”

“Give me your hand,” Bellatrix said before she could overthink it. 

Granger’s hands were ink-stained, otherwise clean, with sensibly short nails. They were clipped, not bitten. Bellatrix didn’t want to undress but she didn’t have to if they kept it to this. Instead she hiked the robes up, let Granger’s fingers insinuate themselves under her shift, and gave her instructions as necessary: there, not there, harder, more fingers. Bella watched the girl’s face, the brown eyes intent on a new problem, the lips curving up, slowly, as she started to get the hang of it. She ground down on Granger’s hand, appreciating the fingers curving up into her cunt as much as the shoulder pressed into her chest, the head against hers, the feeling of another human being’s skin against hers, warm and alive. 

She could have kept going like that for a long time, appreciating the warmth, trying not to consider the _person_ , but Granger was intent and wouldn’t be satisfied. Bellatrix closed her eyes and buried her face in Hermione’s curls and thought of blood smeared across skin and the look on Granger’s face if she found out who she was fingering and the utter catastrophe and surrender of that recognition, and something kindled in her that Granger’s fingers stretching her open couldn’t do alone, and she came, teeth sunk into her lip to stifle any noise.

That was very nearly that, but as she was straightening her robes and charming her mouth clean, Granger glanced in the general vicinity of her left arm and said, “You’re not going to tell me who you are, then, I suppose.”

“It _is_ a Bacchanal,” Bellatrix said, carefully blank. 

“It is. I know you’re marked,” Granger said, as though the look hadn’t been clear enough. “Is that why you turned me down, at first?”

“Because you’re a mudblood, you mean?” Bellatrix made her intonation entirely flat on the word, thinking vaguely of how Snape said it when he had to, trying not to echo her own past words. “I don’t care about that. I was mildly concerned about being arrested.”

Granger blew out her breath, looked away across the crowd and said, “You’re anonymous, and we’ve both admitted it, so will you answer something for me?”

“Depends on what it is, I suppose. Naturally not my real name.” Bellatrix slipped the fox mask back down, not that she had anything useful to hide but expression.

“No, never that.” Granger rolled her eyes. “Why?” she said. “Okay, you say you don’t care about ‘that,’ and you’re not the first person who’s said something like that to me. But you can’t _honestly_ have believed Voldemort would reward you, can you? He went around killing people for the slightest mistakes, he never shared anything he didn’t have to...”

“The view you received was fairly limited.” Bellatrix shrugged, gathering her thoughts to answer. She shouldn’t have, but she’d missed talking, honestly, as much as touch. “Not necessarily because of your blood status but because of your age,” she added when she saw Granger start to bristle. “He was... different, when he came back - as much because of spending more than a decade alone in a hollow tree as anything else, I imagine - and less capable of connecting with people, whether to persuade them or to reward them or even to effectively punish them. He just lashed out blindly. Most of the ranks were held together by terror as much as anything else at the end. Some of us were hoping it was fixable, or that he would recover given more time. Many of the upper ranks were also already convicted Death Eaters, you may recall, as well.”

“No, I don’t imagine, say, Bellatrix Lestrange would have been able to change careers and take up, I don’t know, bar tending,” Granger said. Bellatrix let herself laugh at the mental image, which would have been absurd to anyone, and did not comment. “So your argument is that you were in it for the money the first time, is it? And then were too scared to leave?”

“Not the money,” Bellatrix said. “He offered many things to many people: recognition, belonging, a cause, protection from family in a form that wouldn’t get them disowned. And, yes, encouragement in indulging blood lust, someone to feel superior to - particularly for the poorer and less educated sort of pureblood - a chance to have power over others either within the ranks or when he eventually won...” She stroked Granger’s hair, absently, tracing the springy curls down the side of her face and thinking of Andromeda as a young girl. They already hadn’t been speaking, by the time she was Granger’s age now.

“Which was it for you?” Granger said.

“Oh, a little blood, a little recognition,” Bellatrix said, lightly. One thing to play games, another to give away personal and identifying information.

“Yes, I imagine the Blacks would have given you the first but not the second,” Granger said, trying to drawl like Bellatrix, but she couldn’t carry it. Nevertheless Bellatrix froze. “Your accent is pretty distinct in the middle of sex.” Granger raised her head, dark eyes blank. “No, I didn’t realize it at first, but you were very tactful. And I knew you were _someone_ , and Carrow’s accounted for.”

“Is this the point where the Aurors swoop in?” Bellatrix said, deliberately dryly, and turned her head determinedly away from Granger, to the sleeping and very much awake and occupied bodies surrounding them. 

“The collateral would be a little excessive,” Granger said, equally dry. “And I’m not sure an accent is admissible in court.”

“Lovely seeing you again in that case,” Bella said, and took advantage of their closeness to kiss Granger’s mouth one more time, hard, before she Disapparated.


End file.
